Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has fired a top official with the National Institutes of Health who blew the whistle on internal clashes over vaccine research in the early months of the Trump administration.
On Wednesday, Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo received a letter from Kennedy — which CBS News reviewed — informing her that her role leading NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, had been terminated. He did not cite a cause beyond his constitutional authority to do so. Last month, in an exclusive interview with CBS News, Marrazzo said she had been silenced when she and her colleagues pushed back against NIH officials appointed by President Trump who questioned the importance of childhood flu vaccines and canceled long-running clinical trials.
“My termination, unfortunately, shows that the leaders of HHS and the National Institutes of Health do not share my commitment to scientific integrity and public health,” Marrazzo wrote in a statement following her firing. “Congress must act to protect scientific research from those who would serve political interests first.”
Marrazzo had been in her role since August 2023, succeeding Dr. Anthony Fauci, who had served as NIAID director for nearly four decades. She was put on indefinite leave in March and filed a whistleblower complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel in September, alleging illegal retaliation. In a statement, Marrazzo’s attorney alleged her firing is further “retaliation for her protected whistleblower activity.”
Despite following a well-established whistleblower process by filing a complaint with OSC, recourse for Marrazzo is far from certain. Mr. Trump fired the head of the independent agency in February and has since installed his top trade official Jamieson Greer to lead the agency on an acting basis.
In August, the office launched an ethics probe into Jack Smith, the former special counsel who indicted Mr. Trump before he returned to office for his actions around the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and for allegedly mishandling classified documents from his first term.
The allegations in Marrazzo’s whistleblower complaint focus on Dr. Matthew Memoli, who served as acting NIH director earlier this year before moving to the health agency’s No. 2 post.
Marrazzo claimed Memoli made statements downplaying the importance of vaccines that closely mirrored the views of Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic. In a series of meetings, Memoli argued that “vaccines are unnecessary if populations are healthy,” and that the NIH “should not focus on vaccines,” Marrazzo alleged in her complaint.
Marrazzo told CBS News it was like “hearing the echo of” the vaccine skepticism often promoted by Kennedy. “It was extremely alarming,” Marrazzo said.
An HHS spokesperson defended Memoli to CBS News, writing in a statement: “He remains fully aligned with this administration’s vaccine priorities and consistently champions gold-standard evidence-based science.”
In June, Kennedy removed all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Vaccine Practices, which makes vaccine recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control. He then handpicked their replacements, and the newly reconstituted panel recently voted to endorse splitting the measles, mumps, rubella and varicella vaccine into separate shots.
